ODOT's New Smartphone App to log Trip Data; Admiral to talk Climate Change

Early this summer you might remember news about STRAVA making heat maps of bicycling activity available.

The bike shops, Starbucks, and the Bike Club's red lot ride origin
are all popular with this subset of people who bike

ODOT purchased a round of this data, but it looks like they might have evaluated the on-going subscription cost and decided that something in-house could be cheaper and more predictable heading into the future.

via PSU College of Engineering

Last week together with PSU and a few others they announced ORcycle, a smartphone app that will log your bicycling activity and feed it to the active transportation planners who are desperately looking for data on dangerous places, raw counts of people who bike, as well as movements people actually take through intersections and other facilities.

The PSU site has a privacy document, so you can evaluate how to make the privacy settings work for you. If you already use something like STRAVA, I don't know if ODOT hopes this will replace that app for Oregonians, if the apps layer easily, or if you'll be faced with needing to turn on both of them each time you go out. (I hope there are plans for a v2.0 release that will iterate features as needed as more people use the system.)

BikePortland has a longer story on the app. Practically the first thing that occurs to folks is that there are lots of people who use bikes who don't also have the latest smart phone. So there are going to be significant demographic skews to the resulting data set. And STRAVA's sample size might always be signficantly larger than the number of those installing this app.

But it's important to remember that this is just a tool. Some data is usually better than no data!

The app is a very interesting move, and it will be fascinating to watch it evolve and to see how it might inform funding and design choices in the future.

City Club Talk on Climate Change

Remember this fellow?

"If you’re a conservative—half of America—why would you take yourself out of the debate? C’mon, don’t be stupid. Conservative people want to conserve things. Preserving the climate should be high on that list."

Commie-Hippie-Tree-Hugging-Agenda-21er, prolly

Back in April we mentioned this interview with Rear Admiral David Titley on Slate:

I see climate change as one of the driving forces in the 21st century. With modern technology and globalization, we are much more connected than ever before. The world’s warehouses are now container ships. Remember the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name? Now, that’s not a climate change issue, but some of the people hit worst were flower growers in Kenya. In 24 hours, their entire business model disappeared. You can’t eat flowers....

Here’s another one: We basically do nothing on emissions. Sea level keeps rising, three to six feet by the end of the century. Then, you get a series of super-typhoons into Shanghai and millions of people die. Does the population there lose faith in Chinese government? Does China start to fissure? I’d prefer to deal with a rising, dominant China any day....

A lot of people who doubt climate change got co-opted by a libertarian agenda that tried to convince the public the science was uncertain—you know, the Merchants of Doubt. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people in high places who understand the science but don’t like where the policy leads them: too much government control.

Where are the free-market, conservative ideas? The science is settled. Instead, we should have a legitimate policy debate between the center-right and the center-left on what to do about climate change. If you’re a conservative—half of America—why would you take yourself out of the debate? C’mon, don’t be stupid. Conservative people want to conserve things. Preserving the climate should be high on that list.

And he's coming to town later this month!

Rear Admiral, USN, (Ret.) David W. Titley, Founding Director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, The Pennsylvania State University, will give a talk, "Climate Change and National Security: People not Polar Bears," at the Salem City Club on Friday, November 21st.

Hopefully this will get different folks thinking, and won't just be more preaching to the choir. As he says, "Conservative people want to conserve things."